Not just because he got to make video games, and not just because he sold a company to Google Inc. for an eye-popping amount. Baggett, busy building an uber-ambitious email client called Inky, is in the enviable position of not needing venture capital.

He doesn't have institutional investors on his back — who have limited partners on their backs — imposing an artificial deadline for a launch or exit. He can take his damned time to get it right.

“When you raise money from professional investors, you have to be very clear about what their expectations are in terms of time-line,” Baggett said in a recent interview with me. “If you are going to do a startup that has a long gestation period, like this one, where you are creating a whole new platform and it’s a non-trivial amount of code...that’s hard to fund through the typical VC or angel model.”

This isn't simply a luxury. He sees no reason to rush something that can't be rushed.

Inky, the flagship product of Baggett’s Bethesda-based Arcode Corp., is a desktop email client that consolidates a user’s inboxes and sorts messages based on relevance. It brings context to an otherwise dumb process. “If you get a message from your boss, the email client should know that’s your boss.”

The returns Baggett reaped from Google's $700 million acquisition of Cambridge, Mass.-based ITA Software Inc., which he co-founded, have allowed him to mostly bootstrap Arcode. And here, it's important to note that those returns could have just as easily bankrolled a pleasant lifestyle of doing nothing.

“He could be hanging out in Aspen, or an island, and never work again,” said Bob Nelson, CEO of McLean hotel-tech startup CrossMine Inc., in which Baggett is an investor. “Instead, he chooses to hole up in Bethesda with a bunch of fellow geeks building one of the trickiest, hardest products anyone could ever want to tackle.”

Inky isn’t yet formally launched, partly because — as Nelson alludes — it needs to be great out of the gate to be competitive. The popular principle of "minimum viable product" doesn't work here. Baggett wants Inky to become its users’ primary, everyday e-mail client, which means it needs to beat Outlook, Gmail and Apple Mail, with the full feature set that people have come to expect from native desktop software. “And that’s a pretty high bar," he said. To supplant the incumbent email giants, Baggett reckons Inky also needs to be more elegant, as well as smarter. Hence, they're stripping out or consolidating the patchwork of toolbars and buttons that adorn the typical e-mail client.

“We have an aggressive minimalism to our user experience,” Baggett said. “If we can remove a control, we’ll remove it.”

Baggett has been toiling in intentional obscurity, unwilling to unleash a half-baked product. He would have continued to operate in stealth mode but for an apparently random write-up in Hacker News from a user who stumbled across Inky. From there, tech sites picked up on the product as Arcode worked to iron out bugs.

His background is almost comically diverse. He holds bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from the University of Maryland and the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, respectively. Before co-founding ITA Software in 1998, he was the first employee hired at the video game developer Naughty Dog, where he co-created the first two installments of the Crash Bandicoot games for Playstation.